makes a cathedral
by bloodbuzz
Summary: When Will and Tessa are eight and seven, respectively, Will loses his footing and plummets down the last few hard, concrete steps leading up to their primary school. / a platonic soulmates au


**attn/notes | **for jess (autumn midnights). if anyone is confused, there are notes at the bottom.

* * *

When Will and Tessa are eight and seven, respectively, Will loses his footing and plummets down the last few hard, concrete steps leading up to their primary school. He makes an aborted motion to catch himself, but the railing is out of his reach. His arm hits the collides with one, the bone snapping on contact, and his face collides with the sidewalk at the base, skidding across the concrete.

Classes were dismissed ten minutes ago, so parents are waiting in their luxury cars and a smattering of faculty members are milling about the schoolyard, supervising. Tessa's climbing into the backseat of her father's SUV, left arm extended to hoist herself up when it happens. She hears Will's cry on the moment of impact; she suffers it, too, the splintering of bone, and clutches her arm to her chest, stumbling the half way out of the car, falling on the sidewalk. Her face erupts in pain and she sits where she's landed, crying.

Coming around the car to examine her, Richard Gray notices the group of people, adults and children alike, congregating around the front of the school. He bends down to check on Tessa, but she shakes her head and grits her teeth through the tears, "It's not me; it's Will."

He inspects her for physical harm anyway, paternal instincts overriding his ability to just believe his daughter. When he's satisfied that Tessa doesn't have any bodily injuries, he gingerly lifts her to her feet and brushes her dress off. They walk together, hand-in-hand and stride-by-stride to the site of the incident, pushing through the crowd until they reach the center.

Will is lying on the sidewalk, head just in the grass, clutching his arm. The school nurse is attentively dabbing at the flesh on Will's cheek with disinfectant. Tessa goes to him immediately, dropping to her knees and wrapping her fingers over Will's where they're clutching above the break.

_I'm here. _It's all she can think to tell him, but it's all he needs to know. She can feel the pulsations of pain going to his arm, screaming in her mind, but she shuts it out.

"How'd you know it was me?" he asks, and Tessa knows the words would be dripping with sarcasm if they weren't laced with pain. He hasn't cried yet, but he looks on the verge of it. Tears are pooling on his eyelashes, magnifying them, and some have just barely slipped over and are inching their way down his face.

"Had a feeling," she says, and Will huffs out a laugh, then winces. She leans forward and whispers conspiratorially, "Plus, I think everyone heard you scream." Will chuckles again, this time not hard enough to jostle his arm. _Thanks._

_You're welcome._

Richard ends his phone call and walks toward the pair. "That was your mother, Will. She's going to meet us at the hospital. Do you think you're okay to start moving?"

Will tries to sit up and grimaces, laying his head back against the grass. "Give me a minute."

Tessa doesn't release her grip on Will's hand the entire ride to the hospital, clutching it as if her own life depends on it. They part only when Will is taken for an x-ray that confirms what they all already know. While his arm is being scanned, Linette hugs Tessa close and says, "Thank you for being there for him."

Tessa shrugs, as if it'd been a no-brainer. It had been. She can feel the anxiety thrumming through him and tries to push back calming waves, though she's still shaking a little herself. "He would've done the same for me in a heartbeat." _I would have, Tessa. You're right._

The doctor tells Will that he'll have to wear a cast until his arm heals. He chooses the bright yellow wrapping; Tessa is the first one to sign it in the big, looping cursive letters she's just learned to write.

Will wears the cast for six weeks, and while Tessa's arm is bare, she finds herself using that arm less and less often.

* * *

On the nights when Tessa's parents work late, doing pro bono clinic work for patients who don't have access to insurance, Tessa goes home with Will. She sets the table for dinner and Will helps her with her math homework. They don't talk a lot, but then, they don't have to. Will can feel her frustration at her failed calculations, or if she doesn't understand her reading assignment, and is there to help her before she can ask. They'll thread their fingers together and he'll work through all that he can help her with, give her pointers for how to respond to which teacher.

One night, when Will is ten and Tessa is nine, her parents haven't called and it's well past the time the free clinic closes. Linette tries their cell phone numbers and Mark calls the number for the clinic, but no one answers.

Around ten o'clock, Tessa is falling asleep against Will's shoulder on the couch, a silent conversation being held between the two. She startles when there's a knock on the front door and she rushes to it, throwing it open despite having been hounded about not opening the door for strangers.

"Mom! Dad! Whe—who are you?" Tessa is tired and confused, but she thinks she has the right to be upset that it's not her parents standing in front of her.

"Are you Tessa Gray?" one of the men asks. Tessa nods. By now, Will's standing behind her, hand on her shoulder, and his sorrow is licking at the edges of her mind, mixed with what she thinks is pity, too. "I'm Officer Wayland and this is my partner, Officer Mortmain. Is there an adult we can speak to?"

Tessa nods again, confused as ever and a little irate now. Before she can call for Mark or Linette, they're already approaching the front door. Even Ella and Cecily have come down from their rooms to examine the spectacle. Upon spotting the officers, Linette breaks down. The waves of sympathy rolling off Will turn into tsunamis as he puts his arm around her and leads her to his room. She crawls into his bed and settles under his covers. His sympathy tsunami is starting to tear at her nerves, and he can tell. _It's going to be okay. It's not going to feel like it at first, but I promise, it's going to be okay._

_What's going on, Will? _Tessa asks, and she gets a glimpse of an inconceivable horror, but he builds a wall between them; he shuts off their connection and that's when she knows that Will's a liar. It's not going to be okay.

"What's going on?" she asks out loud, and he turns to face his bookshelf. His shoulders are tight.

"Let's read something," he says instead. He runs his fingers over the spines of his books and picks one out at randomly, already on his way back to the bed. He crawls in beside her and she slumps against him. "You haven't read _A Tale of Two Cities,_have you?"

Tessa giggles at that. "Like _you _can read something like that, Will. You're only ten."

Will sticks his chin out. "I'll be eleven in two months, _thank you_. Do you want me to read it or not?"

"Yes, please." Will opens the book to the first page and starts reading the words in faded ink. As he reads, they relax into each other, the worry fading from Tessa and the tension flooding off Will's shoulders ebbing. He's barely twenty pages in when there's a soft knock on his bedroom door and like a rebuilt dam breaking again, the tension is back; he's still not letting Tessa in. He's still hiding the connection and her distress keeps bouncing back at her.

Mark nods and Will gets up to leave, as if they'd been having a conversation with their minds, but Tessa knows that's not possible; that kind of connection doesn't exist outside of her and Will, as far as she knows. Will kisses her on the forehead and leaves his room, shutting the door behind him. When he's downstairs, he pulls down the wall, but he's still guarding himself. Tessa knows what that means: he's there for her. _Thanks._

_Got your back._

Linette moves to sit where Will had been. She doesn't curl up to Tessa, though. Mark sits at the foot of the bed.

"Tessa," Linette starts, "a lot of things are about to change . . ."

Before she knows it, she's on the downstairs couch with Will, crying into his pajama shirt. He doesn't have to say anything; he just holds Tessa. She's vaguely aware of Will's parents standing in the doorway, but she ignores them, instead drowning herself in the pools of condolence mixed with sorrow from Will.

* * *

In the most ironic use of the word, the funeral parlor feels comfortable. The artificial scent of home cooking permeates the air and all her family members are there, smelling like airplane cabins and alcohol. She pointedly avoids the viewing room; she cringes even looking that way and seeing her parents' smiling faces. She's aware that it's a tribute, but she has to plant her feet where they are to stop from knocking the display over. Call it instinct.

Just as she's about to make a run for it, she feels Will's hand slip into her own. He's been an ever-present source of comfort for the past few days and today is no different. Tessa thinks she might have exploded if not for his help.

After all the lingering family limbs have boarded planes back to the Pacific Northwest, Arizona, and England, Linette and Ella help Tessa pack up everything she owns while Mark, Will, and Cecily pack up the rest of the house. Tessa takes the spare room at the end of the hall in the Herondale house. Her job as the table setter becomes a permanent, daily thing and Linette learns that Tessa takes exactly two sugars with a sprig of peppermint in her before-bed tea. Ella braids her hair in the morning before school and the morning carpool becomes less of a carpool and more of just a ride to school.

* * *

Will and Tessa had never questioned their special connection. As doctors, Richard and Elizabeth had been skeptical and even a frightened by the appearance of telepathy in their daughter with someone with no blood relations, but as they had gotten older, they had resigned stop questioning it.

Their connection isn't a problem until Will turns thirteen. His body is changing rapidly, and he's on a long journey of self-discovery that's totally natural. What's not natural, however, is the emotional scarring that Tessa endures on his journey.

(She'll pay him back in years to come, though. She'll be sloppy when guarding the connection and he will get flashes of images, of emotions. Will'll know when Tessa follows her first boyfriend, Gabriel Lightwood, into the abandoned dugout and pulls his too-tight baseball pants down his thighs. He'll get _every second _of that, and Tessa won't be able to explain away the dirt standing out like a bullet wound on the pale skin of her knees. Will is also going to take Gabriel into that very dugout and punch him when he breaks her heart. It'll happen.)

They don't talk about it, but they do close the connection more often than not during their sexually formative years. The separation anxiety doesn't outweigh the scarring mental images.

* * *

During Will's first week of college, Tessa drives the five hours to see him. Twice. He lets her into his dorm without a word, but she can feel the relief rolling off him. On her first visit, he's just finished unpacking and his bed is, miraculously, made. In an effort to preserve its neatness, they crawl on top of the covers. Will entwines their fingers and they just sit like that for a while, absorbing the presence of _home_ coming off each other. Eventually, Will nudges her shoulder.

_I'm so glad you're here._

_I wouldn't be anywhere else in the world._

* * *

**notes, part deux | **this is supposed to be a soulmates au? in such aus, there is generally a soul connection - delivering telepathy. because i didn't feel comfortable writing romance with an invasive connection, this is a platonic soulmates au. sorry if it's a bit stiff; this is miles from what i planned. shoutout to Estoma for editing, and as always, please review. xx


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